Every growing company has a common problem: finding good people fast enough to meet critical business objectives. Existing options for finding and managing candidates are highly fragmented and time consuming to manage, often including web postings, advertisements, employee referrals, engaging recruiters, and searching resume bulletin boards.
The market for recruiting services in the United States and elsewhere is rapidly growing, and according to industry sources, businesses in the United States spent over $13 Billion (US) to hire new employees in 1997. As Internet usage becomes ever more widespread, companies from a broad range of industries are expected to do at least part of their employee recruitment over the Internet. There are forecasts that, by 2003, most large companies, 60% of the medium companies and 20% of the small companies in the United States will use the Internet for recruitment purposes. In 1998 alone, there were over 28 Million job postings on the World Wide Web.
Most companies face another set of challenges having to do with managing the hiring process. While a variety of tools and services for portions of the hiring process exist, there is no single tool which spans the tasks of defining a position, recruiting, interviewing, candidate selection, candidate negotiation, and assimilation of new hires.
A central problem with existing approaches is the difficulty communicating what the actual status of the hiring is and what are the next steps of the hiring strategy. “I interviewed him or her, now what do I do?” “I interviewed for 6 hours and I never heard anything from anyone afterwards?” “I opened new job request with the Human Resources Department. It has been over three weeks, and I haven't heard from anyone. What is going on?” Note the problem doesn't change when recruitment is out-sourced, in fact in many circumstances, communications becomes more difficult and/or erratic.
An associated communication problem is the inability for changes in hiring strategies to be communicated to everyone affected. There are many reasons why a hiring position may be either frozen or cancelled, but seldom do the people involved in the hiring activity find out about them in a time-efficient manner. As a consequence, job interviews occur for positions that no longer exist, people are brought long distances for no realistic objective, and they don't find out about it till much later, if ever.
Another problem that pervades this sea of partial solutions is the basic financial management questions, which become so difficult to answer. How much did it actually cost to hire for a given position? How much did the corporate entity lose in delays for hiring that position? How long did it take to fill the position versus when the position was to be filled? Each of these questions is difficult to answer and/or questionable in its accuracy of answer today.
Sitting on top of these problems is a fundamental difficulty in managing a recruitment process where there is no established, reliable way to review whether a corporate entity's hiring strategy was accurately implemented, realistically adjusted based upon interim results, and met its corporate objectives.
Today, there is no realistic mechanism supporting the adjustment of a hiring strategy based upon interim results. The options are usually not thought out and reviewed, so management decisions are made in a vacuum. They “just happen” leading to erratic results whose only certainty is they have cost money, take time and take resources. The interim results are difficult to coherently collect and review with relevant decision-makers. The consequence of this is more sporadic activity and misdirection, often feeding on itself. Usually costing far more than is reasonable.
There are common problems experienced with existing tools when someone newly hired arrive at the job site for the first day of work. They may discover that at least one crucial piece of their work situation is missing. Examples of such missing pieces include, but are not limited to, a working telephone, phone mail account, a computer interfaced to the relevant networks, desk, chair, employment contract, non-disclosure agreement, provision for business cards, and corporate security IDs.
There are additional problems with existing personnel tools related to the discontinuity between the various pieces, having to do with the ability to confirm the reality of recruiting management estimates. Many managers will either assume that the job market is the same as it was the last time they hired in a given field, or will choose to paint an unrealistic picture about the effort and expense of filling a given position without even checking. The consequent cost of these managerial mistakes is huge. What is needed is a mechanism providing rapid and accurate feedback to a corporate entity's personnel department or executive group on just what it takes to fill one or more positions.
A number of companies have put in place referral mechanisms to identify candidates for job positions either in their organizations or in their clients' organizations. While these efforts were definitely pioneering in their intent, there are several persistent problems with existing referral mechanisms.
Tracking referrals has tended to be sporadic, leading to cases of an individual referring highly qualified people whose information never gets to the correct hiring authorities, or someone is hired based upon a referral and appropriate recognition is not made to the referring source.
Any single person's network of acquaintances is limited and existing referral networks are essentially a collection of address books for a handful of people, often limited to some corporate employees, their friends and family, and seldom anything else. People who in fact, may not even know about a job position's requirements nor the communities of people conversant in those requirements. For example, there could be a person within two blocks of the hiring agent, who either is the right candidate or knows the right candidate, but there is no mechanism by which the hiring agent can find that person who is so close by existing referral mechanisms.
While all of the discussion so far has focussed on the corporate perspective, most of these problems have significant negative consequences for individuals looking for positions. Probably the most annoying problem is the lack of coherent communication. Estimates are that 40% of the people applying for positions on the Internet never get any response to their application.
It is important to understand that most people do not look for another job unless there is a very large reason. They may be unemployed, facing lay-off, or the possibility of lay-off, and/or they may be extremely unhappy or frustrated with their current position. The background of stress, worry, frustration and outright fear can be enormous. So the lack of communication mentioned above has far greater consequences than it would under ordinary circumstances.
Today, an individual is severely limited in their ability to find potential positions relevant to their requirements. They may rely on their circle of friends, family and professional associates, but they face the same problem as the referral service. Most of these people will not or can not understand the job requirements or know the people or companies needing such requirements.
An individual accessing the World Wide Web will find thousands of job web sites and a level of depersonalization that would be daunting to anyone under the best of circumstances, and is often devastating to people, who, for whatever reason, are looking for a job.